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If you’ve ever said “why don’t they make movies like they used to?”, this essay is for you. If you’ve ever wondered how to write a story that changes people and maybe even changes the world, this essay is for you. If you’re desperate for a better future, guess what — this essay is for you, too!
Talking about art is always tricky, because what is art anyway? Most of us can’t agree, constantly trying to measure the artistic merit of a thing based on any number of factors like perceived purity of intention, how much money it makes, what kind of genre it is, even how bluntly it makes you feel something. We use descriptions like “high art” and “low art”, “elevated art” and “commercial art”, “Art” with a capital A and “entertainment”. Some of these seem to only exist to make some people feel superior to others. I’m sure you’ve heard many more.
Recently, I was reminded of another set of descriptors for art: constructive art and deconstructive art.
Their implied binary can be expression of the kind of damaging criticism I was just describing, but I think they’re also a way to better understand, interrogate, and think about our own art and creative processes.
Deconstructive art is the more conventionally excepted form of “serious” art. It dissects and blows up norms of all kinds, challenging everything about our world as a way to reveal deeper truths about who we really are.
This is what I mean when I sometimes say “art is a mirror that reflects who we are.”
Constructive art is the opposite.
It’s been on my mind a lot lately thanks to my friend Joe Forte, who brought up his recent conversion to the narrative approach in a recent 5AM StoryTalk episode.
Joe had looked around at the world, at what was happening to it – maybe even what was happening to him – and decided it just made more sense to try to create art that built something. That tried to find a way to something positive rather than deconstruct reality as he’d always believed great art was supposed to do.
I’m putting words in his mouth now, but hopefully I’m getting close enough to his intent. Basically, he was talking about art that helps us survive and restores hope, optimism, something to aspire to.
You might recall an audio essay I shared here last year called “When Did We Stop Dreaming of a Better Future?” about our culture’s rejection of positive forms of science fiction, starting in the late-70s/early 1980s. We did this in favor of sci-fi that’s only interested in enduring or battling dystopia rather than inspiring a future anyone would actually want to live in (as Star Trek once tried to do). If you’re unsure what I mean, Netflix now has a Dystopian Futures category, that’s how dominant this thread of sci-fi has become.
For the longest time, I would’ve said I was struggling to do the same, to create anything truly optimistic about the future rather than only shine a light on our present to better understand how we got to where we are in this moment in history. It turns out maybe I was wrong about that, but more on that in a bit.
Before I get to my own work, I want to tell you about something that happened to me shortly after my chat with Joe and his writing partner and wife Meg LeFauve. It provided me with unexpected clarity on this subject.
This part of the story involves my 11-year-old son, who almost entirely lives off of Star Wars and Marvel films and TV series despite all the other amazing IP-driven films and series I’ve also introduced him to.
In my non-stop effort to expand what he’s willing to watch and gets excited by, I coaxed him into watching the 1998 film Deep Impact with me.
If you don’t recall it, that’s because this Steven Spielberg-produced, Mimi Leder-directed disaster flick was completely overshadowed by another film that was released just before it — a film with an identical premise.
I’m talking about Armageddon and it dominated Deep Impact at the box office.
Both are about civilization-destroying asteroids and humankind’s efforts to blow them up first. The difference is: one is a relatively grounded drama with thriller and action elements, far more interested in real human beings dealing with the inevitability of their own demise; the other is an explosive, incredibly fun film in Michael Bay’s typically overwrought style.
To be clear, I love Armageddon, I do. I’ve seen it many times. By contrast, I hadn’t seen Deep Impact since its release. I wondered if it held up more than 25 years later, especially since I had such powerful emotional memories of it.
The good news is, it absolutely does.
But it’s heavy and it’s a massive ensemble with a lot of narrative threads – some of which are political in nature. As such, it should’ve been very difficult for my 11-year-old to follow.
It turns out, the opposite was the case. That kid felt every moment of it. So much so, it’s the first film he’s ever cried watching. He sobbed through the last 20 minutes — and then declared it his favorite film of all time.
A month later, he saw Project Hail Mary, bawled through its final act this time, and then declared it his new favorite film of all time – better than any Star Wars film, Avengers: Endgame, Batman, you get the picture.
So, the question I wondered was: why?
After discussing with my son what shook him about both experiences, I think I understand the answer now. It has to do with another subject I’ll be discussing soon on 5AM StoryTalk with psychologist Dr. Dacher Keltner – which is awe and its power to create profound, sometimes life-changing emotional experiences within us.
Awe, which is a very new field of study Dacher is helping to lead, can be triggered by many things. One of them is moral beauty, otherwise known as acts of courage and kindness, strength or virtue in others.
It turns out, it’s one of the most common triggers of awe, too. It’s why watching firemen, police, and paramedics rushing into the hell of 9/11 brought tears to our eyes and filled us with such profound admiration for them – but also, maybe more importantly, what human beings are capable of. They made us want to be better people ourselves. They made us, if only briefly, feel like we were truly united — even across many borders.
Moral beauty isn’t only found in major acts of courage like the ones I just described either. We might find it watching a mother somehow soldier on after losing a child or in soldier suffering from PTSD finally asking for help.
And there you go, that’s it. That’s the answer to my son wept through the final acts of both Deep Impact and Project Hail Mary and why, out of nowhere, he suddenly wants to watch more films that will make him feel the same.
I think he’s waking up to his potential – to humankind’s potential. That’s important because he’s grown up in a world that he’s only understood – spiritually, I guess you might say – as dystopian. He knows kids are mass-murdered every week in America and nobody seems to care. He knows Americans elected Donald Trump. He knows fascists like Trump are on the rise. And he knows corporations are killing the planet and he’s going to grow old in a world that looks nothing like the one he was born into and even less like the one his parents were born into.
I now understand he’s struggled to hope, to believe in something more for us than despair, even if he’s not yet ready to describe it as such. But when he watched Deep Impact, he experienced a story of very different, very ordinary people demonstrating, over and over, profound courage and virtue either in the face of death or in defiance of it.
I mean, this was the first time he’d ever seen a person say goodbye to their spouse and kid before choosing to die for the greater good. I don’t even know if he’d imagined such a thing possible.
He experienced awe as a result – something that used to be commonplace in cinema, I’d argue.
Not for big action sequences, not for special effects, not for god-like beings bashing it out on screen. But awe for run-of-the-mill, flesh-and-blood mortal people facing overwhelming odds and even certain death.
Think about some examples of this:
Rick choosing the greater good over his love for Elsa in Casablanca.
Gary Cooper’s sheriff refusing to run in High Noon.
Spock’s sacrifice at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The pilots and astronauts trying to make it to space in The Right Stuff.
Elliot’s determination to save his alien friend in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
William Wallace dying for freedom in Braveheart.
The landing at Normandy in Saving Private Ryan.
The crew of Apollo 13 both in space and in the Control Room back in Houston.
The passengers of United 93 trading their lives for the ones the plane they’re on will otherwise kill.
And of course, the finales of Deep Impact and Project Hail Mary.
A lot of reasons are given for why Project Hail Mary has become such a success, but I think what I’m describing here is the real reason — though I doubt Hollywood will learn the right lessons from it.
As a culture, we’ve grown fatigued by superheroes and gods and improbable beings battling to decide our fates. We humanize the hell out of them, but maybe it’s what comic book legend Alan Moore always feared out of these kinds of stories. They reduce the world to black and white – yes – but they also promises that someone else, someone more powerful is coming to your rescue.
At the end of the day, people – real human beings – must save us. And for that to happen, we have to believe we’re capable of it. Which requires characters like us, people without extraordinary gifts, to be capable of it, too.
For example, we have to believe that a science teacher crippled by insecurity and fear, lightyears away and alone except for an alien as terrified as he is, can overcome the odds, can MacGyver the shit out of a spaceship, and save humanity.
That’s a story about why human beings are great. It’s a constructive piece of art that provides a kind of road map to a better version of ourselves.
This is what my kid needs now.
Maybe it’s what your kids need right now.
Hell, I think it’s what I need, too.
This brings me to a realization I’ve had about how I’ve been talking about, looking at, and maybe even handicapping my own storytelling for a while now.
I’ve spent the past decade only thinking about my work as deconstructive rather than constructive when I think there’s a middle road between the two. A hybrid of the approaches.
What I mean is, for years I’ve said my preferred approach to stories is to tear the characters and the audience down before they hit rock bottom and bounce back much higher than they started. I wanted to leave people feeling better about the world’s potential after putting them through the grinder, after making them look honestly at who they and we are. You can’t see the light until you understand the darkness, right? (If you’ve read my novel Psalms for the End of the World, I expect you understand what I’m describing here.)
What I’m describing here, the “grinder” metaphor, is of course using a mirror to reflect who we are. It’s the deconstructive part of art. But if I’m honest, I worried I was just clumsily slapping a constructive art button, so to say, on the end of my deconstructive stories. Like a coward, I couldn’t help retreating to the commercial instincts fostered by so many great storytellers I love.
Or maybe it was Hollywood in my head, how it warps your brain to only think about dollar signs. “Be more commercial, Cole.” I certainly heard that enough for the first ten years of my career. And trust me, that’s hard to resist when you’re trying to financially take care of a family.
But upon much reflection, I think what I’m actually describing is the difference between great art and great art that becomes a bestseller, box office gold, iconic.
Not that my work has approached either, just to be clear. We reach and we fail. Maybe I’ve succeeded from time to time, but I’m not going to pretend like I’m Spielberg here.
But what if one of the only ways we can produce awe on screen – or at least awe of the moral beauty variety (the most instructive variety, by the way) – is by honestly and brutally reflecting the human experience and then showing real people overcoming it?
Such moral beauty juxtaposed against tragedy, grief, despair — even horror — can transform a story from just an emotional experience into a transcendent, even spiritual one.
A young boy struggling with the death of his whole world – his parent’s divorce – finding the courage to grow up.
Men running into machine-gun fire to end a world war.
A space shuttle full of astronauts so desperate to save their families and world that they’ll sacrifice themselves to do it.
A science teacher who tried to run away from danger ultimately choosing certain death just for the chance to save his friend from certain death.
These are stories about people like us becoming heroes.
They’re instruction manuals.
They’re roadmaps to better versions of ourselves.
At the end of the day, deconstructive art, the experience of holding a mirror up to our world to show us who we really are, is one approach to creating art…but it’s not the only one, nor the only respectable one.
By contrast, Bertold Brecht believed art isn’t a mirror, rather a hammer with which to shatter our world and rebuild it. That’s the ultimate constructive art metaphor, I think. And he’s right…for some art.
I now realize I prefer the middle road myself, which I think most of my favorite films also take – the ones that have stuck with me most intensely, most emotionally. The ones that have truly changed who I am. I’m just following in their tradition in some desperate attempt to similarly transform what we think we’re capable of as human beings – not merely reflect where we’ve been or where we’ve ended up.
We need moral beauty — and the awe it inspires — in our lives to become better people.
We certainly need both in our art.
Without it, how will we imagine ourselves capable of making the sacrifices necessary to create a future we would want to live in – or we would want our kids to live in?
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